Search form

Main menu

Locational Privacy

Modern communications mean most individuals today walk around with a beacon that transmits their location. Mobile phones register to a nearby tower as the owner moves through space and the phone company can collect that data in real time or retrospectively to physically place the phone with varying degrees of accuracy. Companies can also determine the owner of every handset within range of a particular tower. GPS enabled phones enable far more precise location placement. Many cars now have GPS devices installed some of which transmit the vehicle’s location to a centralized service. As the devices get cheaper and smaller law enforcement agencies can more easily attach GPS trackers to cars and individuals enabling precise round-the-clock surveillance without ever leaving the precinct. Location-based services including maps of nearby restaurants friend finders and other social networks collect location data as part of providing the service or for contextual advertising.

EFF is fighting to protect the privacy and prevent the misuse of this data that users of phones GPS transmitters and location-based services leak to providers and to the government. In our cell tracking and GPS tracking cases we advocate that the law protect this information by requiring police to get a search warrant before obtaining this sensitive data. We also work to ensure that location based service providers don’t abuse the information they collect on their customers or hand it off to other companies or the police without consent or probable cause.

Together with the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, EFF filed an amicus brief arguing police needed to obtain a search warrant in order to monitor a car's location with a GPS device.

A federal magistrate judge in San Jose, California denied a government request for historical cell site records, ordering the government to seek a search warrant for the information. The government appealed this order to U.S.

The California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA), S.B. 178, requires state law enforcement to get a warrant before they can access electronic information about who we are, where we go, who we know, and what we do.

Defendant Aaron Graham was suspected in a series of armed robberies around Baltimore. Without a warrant, police obtained 221 days of historical cell site location information about Graham from Sprint, which detailed 29,000 location points, an average of 100 data points a day.

In January 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that Americans have constitutional protections against GPS surveillance by law enforcement, holding that GPS tracking is a "search" under the Fourth Amendment.

EFF urged the high court of Massachusetts to protect the rights of passengers in cars that law enforcement are tracking with GPS surveillance technology, arguing that both the driver and the passenger of a car have legal standing to challenge the collection of sensitive location data gathered by